Adeon Hawkwood

An interesting idea, but I suspect in practice that would prove to be as buggy (if not more so) than the current oil slick.

Energy and Mental also have good synergy with AR.

Boost Range in Energy increases the range of the cones which makes it easier to target saturate them without needing to get as close. The downside is the risk of hitting the next spawn (especially with Full Auto). It also has good single target damage to help make up for ARs weakness there and a stun you can stack with Beanbag.

Mental basically adds even more AoE damage to AR's and rpovides a bit of close in protection through WoC.

If it was affected by recharge it would have a MUCH longer recharge (probably around 700s since it has a shorter duration than the other god mode powers) and would probably get a full crash as well. The rational with both OwtS and Strength of Will is that by giving them a fixed and unenhanceable recharge they can balance them better between SO'd builds and heavily IO'd builds. All builds have the same up-time on the power which is part of the reason they have a less painful crash than the other god mode powers.

I think at this point Castle should just throw in the towel and just make OSA automatically light (i.e. rather than summoning the oil slick pseudopet and the targetable pseudopet it should summon the oil slick pseudo pet and the flames pseudopet). it's a neat mechanic but it's so buggy I'm not sure it's worth the development effort to try and fix it.

Well Fire is pretty much the highest damage blaster primary. It loses a little to Archery and AR in terms of AoE damage but has better single target damage.

Mental is best described as the farming blaster's secondary. It's not a blapping secondary but it requires you to close in for maximum effect. However in return it offers AoE damage, a low mag Aoe confuse and (most importantly) a nice buff to regen and recovery.

Electricity Manipulation is more of a traditional Blapper secondary. It has several strong melee attacks some close range mez and knockback powers, a damage aura and an endurance recovery tool. It also has some sapping capability but unless paired with Electrical Blast it really lacks the reliable -recovery to fully exploit it. Overall I would say it's a safer secondary for a blapper than Fire and Energy but unless it's paired with Electrical Blast it doesn't have the safety of Ice, Devices and Mental.

I like this idea a lot. Snipes currently have basically no damage bonus to account for their interruptable long cast time, if the set has a 10 second recharge blast you get almost as much damage form that as from the snipe.

I wouldn't have thought so. Caltrops is pretty close to the -speed cap without any slotting at all, a single level 50 common IO will cap it for +2s or lower. I'll have to test it myself sometime.

Yeah, that is something that concerns me as well. Hephaestus/Vulcan would seem a reasonable patron for a Technology incarnate but I still like to be able to effectively roleplay the incarnate abilities as improvements to my character's tech gained through magic rather than using magic in combat.

Yes new money constantly appears but at the same time existing money is also constantly being destroyed (primarily by market fees). Similarly IOs are constantly being created and destroyed (or rather slotted which is close enough to destroyed for our purposes). For the most part the two are relatively in balance (with a trend towards inflation) with the per capita money supply (and IO supply) being relatively constant (baring the occasional exploit). So this sort of thing does decrease the per capita money supply although not necessarily in a meaningful way.

Mmmmm necromancy. Seriously the answer is we do not know. From the few comments the devs have made it seems likely (but has not been confirmed) that we will get new powers (as opposed to just improvements to existing powers). But as for what form those powers will take we have absolutely no clue.

If the devs continue with the pattern in the Epic Power Pools then powers similar to those used by other ATs to make characters more well rounded are possible but thye could just as easily give new powers designed to enhance our existing primary and secondary abilities.

Recluse's abilities are mostly based on the crab spiders (or more accurately their abilities are based on his) but then Statesman is basically an SS/Inv Tanker with a single electrical ranged attack so it's hard to extrapolate from them.

The problem with Trick Arrow is that it's to focused on one thing and not flexible enough. It does do a decent job of boosting damage through resistance debuffs and OSA but outside that it's weak. The other powers in the set are intended to provide damage mitigation but they don't really provide that much mitigation and virtually no alpha strike mitigation (EMP Arrow does provide good mitigation but it has a very long recharge).

So the end result is that several other sets (Rad and Traps in particular) provide almost as much damage bonus but couple it with significantly better damage mitigation. The core problem with several sets (TA, Empathy, Kinetics and Force Fields) is that they are over-specialized. They do one thing VERY well (more damage for TA and Kin, mitigation for Empathy and FF) but lose to more generalized sets that provide both damage mitigation and extra damage in more balanced amounts.

It should also be noticed that several of these sets work better on Controllers than Defenders since the Controller can use his primary powers to help compensate for the over-specialized nature of his secondary.

Personally I like the fact that Trick Arrow is a pure debuff set rather than a debuff-focused set, it gives it a unique status shared by no other set. I think it's reasonable to improve the set's overall performance without needing to make widespread changes to the way the powers work. The core problem is that it doesn't have any focused damage mitigation. It has 5 powers that provide some mitigation but none suffice on their own, only one provides alpha strike mitigation and they don't stack very well. I think some adjustments to these would make the set a lot more useful.

There is no legal requirement to deport foreigners convicted of a crime in your country. There is often pressure to do so but it is acceptable to hold them for the length of their sentence and then deport them.

Points to keep in mind:
1. With the exception of Arachnos troops Rogue Island Villains do not meet the requirements to be considered PoWs. Specifically they don't wear a uniform identifying them as members of an organized military and therefore can be treated as spies rather than soldiers
2. There is no declaration of war between the US and the Rogue Islands and standard Arachnos procedure is to claim that any troops captured in Paragon City are actually rogue A.rachnos troops. Therefore legally any captured Arachnos troops are not POWs but simple criminals

The problem with that is it makes using an exemplared level 50 to farm them harder, not impossible. It basically becomes a variant of powerleveling where the exemplared level 50 farms them accompanied by the lower level chars. In WoW it's pretty common for PvP twinks (low level characters with XP turned off) to get the best BoP gear available at their level simply by having a friend's level 80 run them through the appropriate dungeons. BoP limits the ease of acquiring gear, but if it's worth the effort people will figure out ht easiest way to acquire it.

I just don't buy the idea that BoP inherently makes more powerful items more practical. It can slow down the rate at which people acquire the more powerful items, make them harder to acquire or impose limits on how they can be acquired but at the end of the day if you put a desirable item in the game somebody will use the maximum possible/desirable number of them. PoB can limit the rate at which they achieve this (which may be a design goal) but it doesn't in and of itself limit the number that can be used. To do that you have to put a limit on either how many of the item can be acquired by a character ever* or how many can be used at once. In both of these cases it's not the BoP that's allowing the items to be more powerful it's the limited availability.

BoP is a great tool for MMO designers to use in creating a time sink. It means a player has to do the content to get the times (rather than buying them from a farmer) and with the use of daily quests and the like potentially requires a certain length of calendar time to get them all. While I personally don't care for BoP being used this way I recognize the inherent value of it in maintaining a playerbase so I do grudgingly accept it. But in any case eventually people will farm enough of the item to reach the limit of however many you let them use.

Similarly for AT restricted gear having the gear flag as AT restricted would have the same practical effect as making it BoP.

I guess my main point is that BoP itself doesn't serve to restrict total power level in any way that couldn't also be handled by limiting who can equip items and how many they can equip. What it does serve to do is limit the rate and ease with which items can be acquired. Making items significantly more powerful just because they are BoP is a dangerous route to take. They can be made slightly more powerful (assuming a commensurate difficulty in acquiring them) but eventually someone will acquire the maximum possible so you also need limits on how many can be used.


*Side Note: As a player I HATE having items which are better than regular items but can only be acquired a limited number of times, I always worry about losing them. I'd much rather have items which can be acquired infinite times but only a limited number can be used at once. This way if I accidentally delete one or just respec my character such that I now want Item B instead of Item A I'm not completely hosed.

I did some testing on this a while back (using an Archery Defender) the pseudo pet from RoA does seem to only have a 1.0 base accuracy (using the to hit formula from the wiki and the reported to hit chance in the combat log).

Well technically these are Bind on Pickup not Bind on Equip.

I don't particularly mind Bind on Pickup items but I'm not convinced that Bind on Pickup offers the developers any significant balance advantages that the current Unique tag does not. Bind on Equip and Bind of Pickup serve very different purposes in MMOs. Bind on Equip serves to take items out of circulation and thus help regulate the in game economy while Bind on Pickup serves to force players into performing specific actions to get certain items (with the potential to limit how frequently they can get them).

The net result is that Bind on Pickup doesn't, by itself, impose any limits on player power levels. It can be used to limit how fast they can reach those power levels but at the end of the day the total power level is based on how many they can use at once. So if you want to limit characters to one Enhancement of Pure Awesome you could make it Bind on Pickup and only allow them to get it once in their career or you could make it more readily acquirable and trade able but then make it unique so they can own as many as they want but only slot one at a time.

Bind on Pickup is a great tool for developers to adjust playing styles or limit player advancement I have no argument there but I'm not convinced it's a more useful tool for general balance than simply using unique or max-equipped tags.

But the same benefit can be gained by simply making you only able to equip one at a time (as was doen with the stealth enhancements). Now more powerful inspirations would (possibly) need to be made pind on pickup but those are consumables so different rules do apply.

Munitions is a fun epic, my only real complaint is Body Armor. It's a passive rather than a toggle so you don't have to spend endurance but it provides less than half the resistance of the toggles. Cryo Freeze Ray is a nice hold if you want one. Sleep Grenade is of limited utility to an AR character since a Sleep power doesn't work well if you're tossing out loads of AoEs. Surveillance is a pretty decent debuff to use against bosses and the like plus it has a really cool animation. LRM is a whole lot of fun making things go BOOM! (especially for an Assault Rifle character who doesn't get a standard nuke).

Munitions isn't the best epic in terms of power but it's a very fun epic.

The rational for splitting the damage was actually that ignite will deal MORE damage as a direct attack than it currently does. Currently Ignite summons a pseudo pet, I'm not certain if the pet inherits your damage buffs or not but if it does then any with a remaining duration of less than 10 seconds (which includes build up defiance buffs) will only buff part of the damage. Conversely by making it a direct attack that deal DoT any damage buffs you have at the time will benefit the entire duration. Combined with the fact that I personally think Ignite damage is a bit high anyway means I think a nerf to the direct damage is reasonable. Allowing the option to setup the enemy for bonus damage keeps the existing theme a bit more and is essentially an increase in total damage but a decrease in damage over activation time.

While I mostly use it as a single target attack it does also have it's uses as an area denial ability (although some characters have better tools for that). I actually wonder what the developer's intent was with Ignite, the original version (with 4 second recharge) makes me think they intended it for area denial rather than damage but in practice it's primarily a damage power.

I think my post above pretty much covers my thoughts, the only thing I'd add is that I'd rather it deploy a patch rather than some sort of damage aura. Mostly I just like it more thematically than a damage aura on the target and it also means it keeps a limited area denial effect.